Feminism and Pan Africanism

70 | Feminist Africa 20
conducted an economic survey among Luo women in colonial Kenya. Gender
has been considered as a category of analysis by other Africanists writing
about Kenya who posed questions relating to gender to their respondents
in the field (e.g. Oruka, 1990; Cohen and Odhiambo, 1989). However, in our
view, Kenya’s participation in African feminist academic spaces and networks
still lags behind that of other countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, and
South Africa. Furthermore, as is the case with many African nations, much of
the documentation and circulation of women’s lived histories has also been
limited to studies focusing on women along ethnic lines or in terms of their
urban or rural locations, more in keeping with a colonial archive.
We see the archive as a location for women to document their lived
experiences, and we argue that archiving has great potential to build more
inclusive records, histories, and also futures, bringing the “margin to the
centre” (hooks 2000). The archive has traditionally been a formal space
under the purview of the state and other official institutions. However, we
argue that in the 21st century, cultural production through visual and digital
devices (e.g. community based work with metadata, performance) that allow
for localised inventions and participation can constitute a legitimate archive
too, and thus has the potential to advance various forms of democratisation
by broadening the knowledge base (Maingi, 2011; Sanya, 2013). “History,” of
course, privileges certain narratives and silences others. Therefore questioning
the content and circulation of the history of the nation becomes a necessary
endeavour. Seeing that women are often rendered invisible in conventional
history-making projects, we envision grassroots, national, regional and
continental women’s visibility and archiving in e-spaces (Radloff, 2013) as
well as visual/digital projects. 3 Here we would especially advocate attempts
to (re)member and (re)consider women’s involvement in national histories
that do not privilege imagined and idealistic visions of ‘African womanhood’
– visions of the kind critiqued by novelists such as Ama Ata Aidoo (whose
work is discussed by Delia Kumavie in this issue), Mariama Ba, Okwiri Oduor,
Margaret Ogola and Nawal el Saadawi, among many others.
Collective Memories: Shaping National and Transnational
Imaginaries
The notion of “collective memory” can be understood as the continuous
construction of memories through shared cultural images, stories, and